Hard drive manufacturer Western Digital unveiled redesigns for its My Passport for Mac and My Book for Mac hard drives. The My Passport portable drive is now about 20 percent smaller than the previous My Passport. The My Book features a slimmer design, and the Morse-code cutouts that were used as air vents have been replaced.

Both drives include WD’s new SmartWare software utility that lets you perform backups, retrieve backed up files, set a password for the drive, and more. The My Passport also offers hardware-based encryption.

The My Passport for Mac is available in 320GB ($120) and 500GB ($150) capacities. The 1TB My Book for Mac is $150.—Roman Loyola

Snow Leopard updates abound

Thursday saw plenty of updates to popular Mac programs aimed at adding full compatibility with the recently released Mac OS X 10.6. Thursday’s updates included:

• RapidWeaver 4.3: The latest version of Realmac Software’s Web site creation tool adds full compatibility with Snow Leopard along with the ability to add and edit links in Styled text views via the right-click contextual menu. That menu also now exposes the default commands for searching Google and Spotlight, looking up definitions in the Dictionary, and suggested spellings.

• MacPractice programs: Developer MacPractice says version 3.6.8 of its self-titled practice management and clinical application is now compatible with Snow Leopard. However, there are some caveats: Dentists using the direct interface from MacPractice DR to SuniRay sensors will experience an image-capture issue. MacPractice says it’s working with Apple to resolve the problem.

• ConceptDraw: CS Odessa said all versions of its ConceptDraw productivity application fully support OS X 10.6. That includes the Office, Pro, MindMap, and Project iterations of ConceptDraw.

iWebTemplate offers new iWeb themes

iWebTemplate added seven new iWeb templates for use with Apple’s iWeb web publishing application. The new iWeb themes from iWebTemplate include: Oak, Boardroom, Server, Dark Office, Eye, Picture and Orange. Each theme offers up to nine templates instead of the ordinary eight, and incorporates a number of different graphic elements which can be easily removed, moved and changed in size, opacity or color.

The templates require Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later and iWeb ’08 or iWeb ’09.

Each iWeb theme is available for $10. Samples are available from iWebTemplate.—Jackie Dove